For cleaning equipment, or in irrigation systems and disinfection devices, water or other media are mixed with additives, that are compacted to form a tablet. These use to be dissolved in a mixing chamber.
However, the dissolution of tablets hitherto can only be achieved with large quantities of water or solvent. Since the amount of material that is carried away in the medium decreases, the cleaning effect declines with the reduction of the tablet size. In the end, much water or other solvent must be spent for complete dissolution, without adequate cleaning effect. Therefore the process is often interrupted beforehand, so that a remainder of the tablet remains in the dissolution chamber, which sometimes is tedious to remove.
Another reason for annoying cleaning procedures is, that turbulences in the stream through the dissolution chamber lead to active and neutral zones, where the material easily deposes at walls and in corners.
This pertains particularly to cleaning agents with abrasive components, which are usually water insoluble and heavier and therefore are prone to deposition in partitions with low flow rate, mostly with applications, in which rather tight nozzles must be applied for to achieve an appropriate cleaning effect, because of then only a comparatively small flow speed arrives at high pressure.
For a such kind of applications—e.g. tooth cleaning with removal of plaque—a larger number of proposals have been made for cleaning agents containing abrasive particles.